Journal of Lesbian Studies最新文献

This article examines how The Lesbian Body, Monique Wittig's 1973 literary "reverie," reconfigures the spatial logic of language. As its lovers come together and undo one another through words, the text dismantles the projective regime in which interlocution fixes and delimits subjects in space. In its place, Wittig develops a haptic poetics in which meaning emerges à mesure-word by word-through tactile and communal relation. Central to this reorientation is the j/e pronoun, whose typographic slash interrupts the capture of representation and opens language to ongoing transformation. Reading The Lesbian Body as a material practice in which subjectivity and world co-emerge, I argue that Wittig's spatial experiments unsettle the heterosexual body schema and imagine forms of becoming unbound by inherited coordinates of identity. Her work ultimately advances a lesbian universalism grounded not in projection or identification, but in a shared, haptic geometry of touch.

This article considers Minnie Bruce Pratt and her southern identity. Through an analysis of her personal writings, poetry, and reflections on her own life, I explore the formation of lesbian activism in concert with southern feminine identity. My goal is to expose the risk of a continued reliance on southern tropes that work to silence variations in southern womanhood. What is striking in the political moment of 2025 is understanding that Pratt's work emanated from a southern upbringing and southern identity that she never abandoned.

This article explores Minnie Bruce Pratt's work, life, and legacy through an autoethnographic lens, using two encounters with Minnie Bruce as anchors to build on and circle around; to open into musings, visions, echoes. I argue that Minnie Bruce's poetry and writing contends with her intersecting marginalization, queer desire, and loss: In my reading of her work, I see a firm belief in materialism, communal solidarity, unique visions pushing against dominant expectations. I interweave analyses of Pratt's work with stories from my own life, rivering into my experiences of chronic illness, loss, and transformation as a non-binary trans butch poet. At the heart of this piece are questions of writing with, and beyond, the body amidst the in-between, and I hope to highlight Minnie Bruce Pratt's continuous impact on the queer community, even after the loss of her physical form.

This historiographical essay presents different approaches in the realm of gender and sexuality studies that have been and can be used by historians of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to female same-sex relationships, especially focusing on the long nineteenth century before the widespread understanding of sexuality as medicalized and politicized categories of individual and collective identity emerged. It also explores the distinct challenges of writing such histories in the region, and ways those challenges might be overcome. Scholarship on the history of women's sexuality in CEE is brought into dialogue with interdisciplinary studies from elsewhere in Europe and North America in an effort to exchange ideas about ways of writing such histories, including addressing common definitional and conceptual questions related to historicizing women's relationships with each other that take into account erotic possibilities that have often been ignored or dismissed. The study takes as a starting point the problem faced by many historians who work on sexuality in CEE: the invisibility of female same-sex sexuality in historical records. This problem stems from phallocentric legal, cultural, and confessional definitions of sex which rendered a fuller public discussion of female-female sex (outside pornographic material) almost impossible until the first sexologists appear in the early twentieth century. Even then, such conversations remained highly specialized and confined to the elite. This essay explores scholarly approaches to female same-sex sexuality, how it appeared (or didn't) in nineteenth--century discourses in CEE, and the sexual politics underlying the framing of female same-sex sexuality then and now.

This article, inspired by Elana Dykewomon's Beyond the Pale, explores the intertwined histories of Jewish lesbian and non-lesbian women from the 1870s to the 1920s, tracing their journeys from the Pale of Settlement to early twentieth-century America. Focusing on themes of identity, resilience, and female friendship, it examines how antisemitic persecution and traditional gender norms shaped Jewish women's lives, both in Eastern Europe and in the immigrant communities of New York City. This article employs a literary-historiographical method, situating Dykewomon's novel within feminist and queer historiography, and treating narrative as a form of historical knowledge. By foregrounding Jewish lesbian immigrants' voices often marginalized in mainstream historiography, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of Jewish women's agency, sexuality, and cultural transformation during a period of profound upheaval.

In Mumbai, new streams of private funding and shifting social milieu have supported the growth of LBT (Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender) social and nightlife spaces. A more recent addition to the informal social networks, activist collectives, and support groups that have long comprised a lesbian scene in the city, these spaces are increasingly visible to the public. As greater visibility comes in parallel with homophobic nationalism, the LBT scene offers queer young adults the chance to resolve a disconnect between self-understanding and normative stigma by finding networks of support. However, as the queer expressions that unify these collectivities elide internal differences, Mumbai's LBT scene engenders tensions of inclusion. Drawing upon ethnographic research of queer digital and nightlife spaces in Mumbai, this essay examines how class and caste shape experiences of belonging in the LBT scene. It argues that material costs of access work in tandem with linguistic, aesthetic, and social norms to mediate inclusion in the middle-class LBT scene. Examining how upper-caste terms of desirability and status inform social norms in the scene, I show that caste intersects with class to further dictate belonging. I argue that in their practices of communing, lesbians confront the class/caste boundaries that encumber their pursuits of social support.

In this work, we explore Minnie Bruce Pratt's white lesbian mothering praxis, teasing out possibilities she leaves for unsettling white imperial/colonial motherhood and the family. Framing our exploration of her life and work with a discussion of settler sexuality, white maternalism, and Black feminist revolutionary mothering we put forth an understanding of Pratt as an insider pushed out. Engaging her poetry and prose we examine how Pratt's transgression is not simply, or at least not only, what led her to take up her lifelong, living intersectional feminist politic. Thinking with Sara Ahmed we tease out Pratt's "complicated" way toward living a solidarity praxis and moving in unending struggle toward collective liberation. Lastly, we engage writing as a method of inquiry and theorize with Pratt, bringing our learning with and from her in conversation with others, especially Sophie Lewis who asks us to consider to what end we are queering mothering. Locating Pratt within world-building and world-ending genealogies that map how we can find and lose ourselves (and more), we ask how we might join her "on foot, in a long stepping out" (2013, 28) toward a wor(l)d after mother?

This essay argues that Minnie Bruce Pratt's 1995 lyrical and auto-theoretical text S/HE provides a powerful and still-relevant lesbian feminist, anti-racist vision that is not simply trans-inclusive, but that also highlights deep overlaps between trans and lesbian feminist thought, politics and community. Reading S/HE challenges the notion that feminist and trans approaches to gender are necessarily divergent. To make this argument, I develop close readings of S/HE, interpreted in the context of Pratt's participation in Camp Trans, especially during the summer of 1994, and of the interviews Pratt gave surrounding the publications of her book. I show how Pratt's understanding in S/HE of her own identity and of her relationship with Leslie Feinberg provide approaches to gender, sex, and sexuality that disrupt trans-exclusive feminist logics. Reading S/HE clarifies an important point of intersection-not difference-between some lesbian feminist and trans histories: an attachment to something akin to gender identity.

Can lesbians speak in Hungarian illiberalism? They can and they do, but they are facing new challenges in a polarized society, with NGOs sanctioned and the issue of LGBTQ+ rights instrumentalized to gain voters' support and oppose Western liberal hegemony. In order to understand the illiberal authoritarian present unfolding in real time, local lesbian scholars and activists are challenged to develop new strategies, which also includes rethinking existing academic concepts on lesbian activism. In this paper, we address and challenge how lesbian activism in post-socialist Hungary was implicated with nationalism and ahistoricism in academic literature still considered relevant today. Drawing on our own historical account as lesbian activists and scholars in Hungary since the 1990s, we argue for an (auto)ethnographic focus on lesbian micro-politics, as it responds seismographically and actively intervenes into the illiberal culture wars.